I agree with Aubrey, Melissa, SJ etc. We should indeed promote OA journals and thesis (give a look at http://www.dart-europe.eu : almost 200.000 full text OA from 324 universities and 19 countries automatically collected and searchable thanks to the magics of OA and OAI-PMH), and encourage OA publishers to promote their content on Wikimedia projects. I don't think that it's viable at all to acquire specific journal/database accounts; it's better to create a network of university students willing to provide references and articles on request. For instance, I've tried to do so and I offered to consult the World Biographical Information System Online to help people working on biographies (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Biografie/Strumenti/Fonti ) but nobody has ever asked, so perhaps a global, more advertised program is needed. Another solution is to make university students edit; the fact that they have access to a lot of resources is one of the reasons for the public policy initiative/global university program.
David Goodman, 15/03/2011 18:45: > Universities can't do this, generally. All contracts I have ever seen > limit the off-campus access to people connected with the university. A > few publishers even limit the on-campus access similarly, but most > publishers explicitly permit it. > > But many universities do even worse than the contracts say: they limit > on-campus access in such a way as to not permit access to visitors. > This is true even of some public universities. Various excuses are > offerred, none of them valid--the usual one is lack of computer > facilities, which lost its credibility a number of years ago. I confirm this for Italy (where additionally there isn't any status or actual affiliation for ex students). There may be another reason, though, i.e. that sometimes, if I recall correctly, fees are based not only on the number of students etc. but rather on the FTE (full time equivalent) students or professors etc. If you add random people it's very difficult to use those criteria, which are usually good to decrease costs. In general, those contracts are already horribly complicated and I doubt anyone would like to make things even worse. Nemo _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l